Monthly Archives: August 2010

Will e-books take off?

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The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about the Kindle, iPad and e-books again this week. It's prompted me to post my thoughts on the subject. 

I love books. We have a room full of them, and I can't imagine life without the printed page. But when I got my iPad in May, I saw the potential. I read a sample of Peter Mandelson's The Third Man autobiography on a flight to San Francisco last month, and loved the way I could increase font size and backlighting. It was so much more appealing than reading books on my old Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC in 2001. 

I really wanted to splash out on a few e-books for my iPad. I would have bought the full version of Mandelson's book, despite my contempt for the man's politics and love of the rich and famous. But I was unwilling to pay more for the e-book than I would have paid for the hardback. (Interestingly, three weeks later the Apple title is now priced at £12.99 – identical to Amazon's price for the hardback, but still far more expensive than Amazon's £9.99 price for the Kindle e-books version.) And Apple's iBooks store is so empty of compelling titles that I always leave it without buying. 

Apple has to cut book prices to have any hope of doing for publishing what it did for music with iTunes. Music was a far easier conquest: a 99p music track was a compelling product, compared with buying a CD single, ripping it to your PC and sharing it with your iPod. (Let alone spending hours making a compilation tape to use on your car stereo or Walkman.) Amazon gives us a vast range of printed books at low cost, with next day delivery, while eBay offers a similarly amazing service, especially for out of print titles. I can't imagine a mass market developing for e-books while the devices and the titles remain expensive. 

Disclosure: I work for PayPal UK, part of eBay Inc. 

The day I got my O level results

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Millions of teenagers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland got their GCSE results today. The news made me feel nostalgic, as i got my O level results 30 years ago this month (O levels were replaced by GCSEs in Britain in 1988). 

Waiting for exam results is always nerve racking. But my ordeal in August 1980 was even worse. I was convinced that I had failed maths. And in a further twist of the emotional knife, we were on holiday in California when the results came out. We flew back from Los Angeles to Gatwick a few days later on Freddie Laker's Skytrain – the original British low cost airline. Three decades later, I can still recall the tension as Dad drove us down the M4 from my sister's in Wootton Bassett, where we'd stayed the night on the way home from Gatwick. I rushed through the front door and ripped open the envelope. The first thing I saw was the phrase, "This is not a certificate". In my panic, I thought it meant I'd failed the lot! But I had done as well as I'd dared hope – and against the odds had passed maths. 

Two years later, I made sure we were home when my A level results came out. It was far less of an ordeal!

Photo: here I am at Gatwick, about to fly to America for the first time. The DC-10 carries Laker Airways' Skytrain logo.  

Rob Skytrain 1980
 

Apple: the end of the love affair (for now)

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I've been an Apple fanboy for the last couple of years. I loved my iPhone 3G from the day I got it. It prompted me to buy my first Mac and an early iPad. I've loved the intuitive, gorgeous designs and the contrast with the sheer unpleasantness of life with Microsoft products. (Windows Vista was hideous, but Pocket PC wasn't much better.) 

So I was really looking forward to upgrading my iPhone to the latest model. iPhone 4 looked a worthy successor to Apple's earlier, extraordinary smartphones. But wait: were those stories of dropped calls more than media hype? And why has my previously flawless iPhone 3G turned into a mobile version of the hideous Windows Vista since Apple pushed its iOS4 operating system upgrade? The phone now takes ages to do anything. 

I've spoken to lots of iPhone 4 owners this month. They all report huge disappointment at the phone's performance … as a phone. The dropped signal problem is a real crisis, not an invention of Apple critics. One person bitterly regretted not demanding a refund. Others I talk to are switching to rival Android phones. 

Apple has facing a real crisis. Sales may have been strong in the two months since the iPhone 4 went on sale, but if I'm typical many other likely purchasers are delaying splashing out – or, worse for Apple, are considering rival phones. Steve Jobs' complacent, arrogant response to the iPhone 4's design flaw – 'don't hold it that way' – led many to question the Cupertino company's commitment to its customers. But I was also disappointed by the feel of the latest iPhone. It doesn't caress the hand like its predecessors. That might not matter if the phone worked. But I see no reason to spend a huge amount of money on a flawed product. I haven't renounced Apple. But I feel betrayed. The folks from Cupertino need to start wooing me again after the disappointments of the summer of 2010. 

All the Queen’s counties: why the Royal Mail can’t scrap our identity

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Saturday's Guardian carried a feature by the excellent David McKie warning readers that the Royal Mail planned to delete county names from postal addresses. Royal Mail thinks postcodes are enough, McKie reported.

The feature included pleas from worthies such as Margaret Drabble, Sue Townsend, Jeanette Winterson and Howard Jacobson condemning the move. 

I'd not heard of this fiendish plan before. But a moment's thought suggests it could never succeed. When I lived in Teddington in the late 1980s I included Middlesex in my address, even though that county disappeared in 1965 (not 1974 as McKie writes). In Wales, we still regarded Pembrokeshire as a living county after it had been replaced in local government by Dyfed. (And some people still write Dyfed on envelopes after the 'new' county was abolished just a couple of decades later.) 

In short, the Royal Mail will have almost no influence over how people write their addresses. 

I offer David McKie a better subject for a campaign. Stop politicians messing with our country's geography. The endless reorganisations of local government boundaries have wasted millions of pounds and caused endless confusion.

Media that I pay for – print and online

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I've neglected this blog for a month or so after a prolific spring. So thanks to Ged Carroll,  Stuart Bruce and Stephen Waddington for prompting my first post this month. 

All three were writing about the media they value enough to pay for. I was intrigued to read their thoughts, as media owners around the world are desperately looking for ways to secure revenue from readers, viewers and listeners, especially online. (The subject came up in a meeting I had with one of the Guardian's top journalists today.)

I was really surprised that not one of the media Ged, Stuart and Stephen cited as worth paying for were online. (Or, more accurately, they all cited print versions of media that offer online content.) Now I recognise that most media owners still offer most if not all their content for free online. But there's still a huge amount of paid for content, including now The Times and Sunday Times, plus the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, which have had used successful paid-for business models for years. 

So here's my contribution to the debate – online and print. 

The Guardian

I've been a Guardian reader since the 1970s. I share most of the paper's values, and like its mix of excellent news coverage, often-provocative op-ed articles and lively features. Although the Guardian's content is free online, I value the print edition enough to pay for it – though I enjoy a big discount through its subscriber scheme. 

The Guardian's website is one of the very best in the industry, and I'd happily pay to access it if it ever went down that route. In the meantime, the Guardian iPhone app is well worth the £2.39 price tag. (And its amazing Eyewitness app is free.) 

The Times

I read The Times from time to time (no pun intended) though I find its tabloid format less attractive than the Guardian's larger Berliner size. I also feel the paper's comment section has got thinner in recent years, especially after it moved the leaders to page 2. 

The huge question, of course, is whether Rupert Murdoch's bold move to charge for online access to The Times and Sunday Times content will pay off. I signed up for the £1 special offer for the first month and wondered whether I'd value the content enough to pay for it, given that I'm not a natural Times reader. 

After a month, I'm rather surprised to find that I may well take the plunge. The reason? The excellent morning business news email, with links to the day's Times business stories – and top stories from the Independent and Daily Telegraph (but curiously not The Guardian). I regularly click on David Wighton's business comment pieces. The Times and its Sunday stablemate think culture is the way to lure people into paying for its online content – it features very heavily in their 'paywall' marketing. It won't get me to sign up – but great content might. 

Zinio

If you've bought an iPad, you may have seen Zinio. It's an application that enables you to buy iPad versions of a stack of magazines, including NME, Men's Health, Cycling Plus, Macworld and PC Advisor. I still like browsing a printed magazine, but when I'm heading for the airport I like the idea of taking an electronic magazine. 

Cycling Plus

I've been buying my favourite cycling mag for almost 15 years. It inspired my Land's End to John O'Groats adventure in 2002 (though it took me six years to act on that inspirational C+ feature). I still get C+ every month, but still mourn the demise of Cycling Today, which I started buying in its earlier guise as new Cyclist after I bought my first proper bike in 1989. 

Talk of Cycling Today prompts me to record my sadness at the loss of a couple of other publications I bought regularly. Bike was a short-lived cycling magazine, which wowed me with great design, photos and inspiring articles. Sadly, I was obviously a lone fan. Similarly, I loved Digital Video Technigues, which I found hugely inspiring when I first got into video editing some six years ago. It decided to focus on articles about high-end video editing programs in 2007 and disappeared soon after. 

Buckinghamshire Advertiser

Stuart Bruce mentioned the Yorkshire Post – God's own county's national newspaper. We don't have such a revered title in Bucks, but we do have (amongst others) the Bucks Advertiser. My wife Karen buys it every week. I read it regularly, but usually with a feeling of dismay at this failure of local journalism, as I blogged in March. Judging from the Advertiser, the village of Chalfont St Peter is a hotbed of anti-social behaviour to rival inner city London or New York. A classic example of crime reporting stifling any other image of a neighbourhood. It could do so much better. Still, Karen's the one who coughs up the 65p cover price…

eBooks

I'd love to report that I'm buying loads of eBooks. The iPad is the perfect platform for them, as the reader can change font size and backlighting, and click on links to find out more about the subject. I enjoyed reading a sample of Peter Mandelson's The Third Man autobiography on the iPad on my flight to San Francisco last week. But I wasn't prepared to pay £15.99 to get the iPad version when I could get the hardback for less through Amazon or Waterstone's. In time, that will surely change as publishers and Apple realise that keener pricing will prompt far greater sales.